In case you didn’t hear about it, the Joss Whedon just emerged from his social media hiatus with this little video advocating voting (and specifically, voting against American Republican nominee Donald Trump) on November 8 called Save the Day. It’s a fun take on the super-serious celebrity campaign video, as it stars a bunch of Whedon-associated actors and actresses, such as the Avengers, Julianne Moore, Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris, among some civilians joking (but not really joking) about getting out there and voting.
Takes like these are hilarious, as long as you can get over the method of using humor to reduce the threat Trump poses to a mere punchline (which isn’t that bad, considering the man has made every effort to make himself look cartoonish anyway), and I wonder if maybe an approach like this would’ve been enough to dissuade people from voting the punchlines we have in power today.
Probably not, though, as judging by the YouTube comments of this video alone (I know, why did I do it), it turns out both Trump supporters and undecided voters don’t like being told who to vote for. We live in a paradoxical age where people both want and don’t want to be told what to do, depending on what they feel like doing.
Even in a society like ours, which values celebrity status a lot, people will lash back if they get told things they don’t believe, and they’ll accuse endorsers of the nastiest things they want to believe about them just because they disagree. Also, who’s to say that the politicians we don’t like won’t use this method too?
Either way, I’d rather have cheeky ads like this instead of the over-the-top sappy commercials we get every election period. At the very least, Whedon’s PSA is self-aware, and that’s a trait much of the world is lacking. If we can inject even a tiny bit of self-awareness in everyone, that might be an important step in fixing the problems plaguing us today.
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